Deirdre Osborne: Conceiving the Nation: Visions and Versions of Colonial Pre-natality

In Claudia Klaver and Ellen Rosenmann eds. Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal Ohio State University Press (in press)

In addressing fictional enactments of the man -woman debate that generated an explosion of polemic in both fin-de-siècle Britain and Australia, the Australian rural colonial (bush) woman embodies an as yet unaddressed dimension of the New Woman phenomenon. Moreover, she may expose the limitations facing the European woman who, in comparison, remained more closely embroiled in the imperialist power structure, and is in fact less re visionary than accounts have to date suggested.

Whilst recent scholarship has extensively investigated degenerative imperialism and the ideology of motherhood at the source of empire, the extent to which many imperialist paradigms were re-worked in the unique conditions provided by the colonised spaces requires further retrieval. The emancipatory features of the New Woman and her multiplicitous identity are evident in representations emerging from the colonial arena. Reconfigurations of women’s roles appear to be more radical in some colonial representations than those produced within imperialist Britain. These I suggest are intimately related to the impossibility of replaying the familial model exported with the imperial project, in a colonial landscape. In fact, I propose that it is the colonial woman’s displacement from Euro-centric urban domesticity, which produces a radical relationship with issues concerning gender role revisions.